who said it was about logic?

Since I’ve been doing this forever I have the Adobe package, but if I was starting from scratch…
Microsoft Expression Web: £117.22
Photoshop Elements: c£50
Xara Extreme: £69
Xara Webdesign: £39
Forget the Mac, get a half decent laptop by any reputable company and save a lot of money.

I am having a great deal of trouble relating these comments to the designers I’ve met. Most are just not aware (or interested by) the PC marketplace. Most buy their MacBook on credit (it’s about £40-£50 a month) and set themselves up with the full Adobe suite under the Academic purchase provisions, which slash the costs – when they’re not actually stealing a cracked copy, that is. It’s funny how Creatives, expecting to make their living from what they produce, do so by convincing themselves that the products of others should in fact be stolen…

Issues like using GIMP or Xsara or any of the (excellent but almost un-noticed) Serif suite of applications stumble not on the question of how able they are to duplicate Adobe’s capability, but rather on how hard it becomes to participate in a delivery process. Yes, printers like PDF these days (including PC Pro’s printers!), but finding that you can’t hand over work to other desingers or copy originators in a compatible format puts an upper limit on the size of the job you can do. Also, when it comes to GIMP, will anyone offer up an actual list of real graphics on real web pages that have been entirely delivered with it? Because I can’t find any *working* designers who would admit to it. Just lots of evangelists, who wish it was so. The MacBook thing is a bit like the HP12C calculator in the world of banking – it’s a badge of rank.

Most web freelancers I know charge £300-350 per day for their services. They also set themselves up as businesses which allows them to reclaim the VAT. On the basis of the above, the software element of performing the trade has a return on invested capital of about a week. Not many trades offer such low cost of entry. You’d have to pay out a lot more to be a car technician at your local dealer. If you knew they were using cheaper and arguably less productive alternatives, would you take your car to them?

Mark – I’m a freelancer with a fair portfolio of sites published. I’m not getting anywhere near £300-£350 in this recession. All very well saying I can pay for what I need in a week, that assumes I don’t have to pay a mortgage, eat, visit clients, and so on. In the absence of banks prepared to loan to small businesses, and my reluctance to borrow even if they did, I’m putting money aside to upgrade my software, but it’ll take a while.

On the basis of the above, the software element of performing the trade has a return on invested capital of about a week.

Mike,
the point of the article was to pose the question of how a newcomer to web design could LEGALLY set themselves up with acceptable equipment. I would prefer that Adobe offered their suite two versions back (in this case CS3) for a much lower cost. That gets people legally onto the upgrade path and off the cracked or educational versions.

The Adobe product cycle updates products for Adobe, not its users.

“Picture a web designer in your mind. Just as much part of the uniform as the scruffy jeans and hoodie is the MacBook Pro running Photoshop”

I only know web designers who work for the NHS and the NHS is entirely Dell based.

@Tim
I tend to disagree. Photoshop and Dreamweaver are not the prerequisites for web design – and a Macbook Pro certainly isn’t! They are luxuries rather than necessities.

If money is an issue, there are plenty of free packages available for web and graphic design that do a more than adequate job for someone starting out.

@pete
You got it, I use a dell studio with i5, 6gb ram and various other specs that run rings round a macbook pro, and it cost £1000 less. I used low end software alternatives as I developed my career and purchased CS2 when I had generated enough money. I am now able to purchase upgrade packages, but I would certainly have never borrowed money to buy something that could be done for less. It also validated my subsequent purchase as I had reached the point I could afford it. I disagree the cost is “choking off its audience at the industry entry point”, it offers the cutting edge package and charges accordingly, the web premium package isn’t actually that bad when you look at individual pricing. I wouldn’t charge less for a cutting edge website just in case the company that wanted it couldn’t afford it… they would have to re-evaluate their options, and develop when they had started generating more revenue. Is that not a traditional business model?

@Kevin Partner
A fair point, but from the start of my career I used Photoshop elements which is not ideal but a legitimate way deal with ps files. I strongly disagree with software piracy and was not going to give in to theft, therefore I used my creativity to find viable alternatives, as there was no way I was going to be able to afford to purchase Photoshop. Through persistence and sold effort, I earned enough money through print and web design projects, html and css editing to purchase CS2. I stand by my comment that Adobe charge a price for a top end product. I frequently get asked to deliver more than the client can afford for less as they are start ups, or they ‘need’ the site to progress their business… does this mean i should charge less for my ‘product’ as they cannot afford it?

@Kevin Partner

Like I said, at the agency I worked for, the only Macs we had were in the photo studio, since converted to Windows XP.

The designers used generic XP desktops with dual monitors and Fireworks.

Only the photo-retouch artists had Photoshop and the resulting images were put on the project’s share in JPG or PNG format.

The web developers had generic Windows XP machines with, mainly, open source software – Eclipse and JavaBeans being the favourite tools. A few machines had CS3 on them, but even then, most of the time, the devs preferred the open source tools to DreamWeaver and Fireworks.

Fireworks was the only one we regularly used – to view the artists mock-ups.

I must admit, after years of reading about agencies being packed full of Macs, I was a little disappointed to find that actually Macs accounted for less than 2% of the machines in the place.

In our office, the only Mac was an old G3 used for testing – it was so old, it couldn’t run a half way up-to-date version of Safari, so we ended up bringing our personal Macs in to perform testing.

Kevin – In the actual EULA I believe it allows commercial work upon completion of your course. You might want to check with Adobe, but that is what I’ve been led to believe.

Mark: yes, you can upgrade but of course there’s a cost. Unless I’m mistaken, what they mean is upgrade from, say, CS4 Web Premium academic to CS5 Web Premium commercial by paying the standard commercial upgrade price (£559) – I don’t think you can simply upgrade a CS4 academic to CS4 commercial. I might be wrong, it’s not that easy to find out.

I have always felt that if Adobe wanted to solve the piracy of its software problem, it should simply lower the price of admission for its software. Look at the video game industry. I guarantee you that the average Xbox/Playstation game takes as many man-hours (if not many, many more…) to develop as the next increment in Photoshop. Yet they are able to get away with (and make tremendous profits) at the $50-60 USD price point, because that is what their target audience can and is willing to afford. If there is an abundance on piracy, then you have not found the sweet spot for supply and demand. Quite simply, cutting the cost could quadruple their profits as all those people that used to pirate would now feel the cost was justified.

To say no-one needs photoshop is wrong, while the gimp is fine for web publishing, it is not good enough in professional photography. Much of what I do in image maipulation is impossible with the gimp, or any of the cheaper software, these also do not handle high colour-bit depth either.

I set myself up as a freelance web designer using a refurbished PC running linux. All the software I am using is free, and I don’t use photoshop. The only program I have running under wine is Spotify.

Yes, photoshop is a nice piece of software, but it’s not a prerequisite to making a good design. Design is about the skill of the designer, not the software they use.

I’m alarmed at the content of this article, in fact, I would say the only unavoidable software cost for a web designer is actually a windows licence, as you’re going to need to test in IE at some point.

By removing design standard Adobe are exploiting their postion as the defacto standard for designers. Larger agencies may not care much since since they will probably use the entire app suite of web premium anyway but for smal businesses and new entrants the price is significant. I fear also that this raising of the cost of entry is effectively a barrier to entry for new web designers.

Even if the fledging designer goes down teh route of Dreamweaver and Fireworks and ignores the prohibitive pricing of web premium of the stand alone Photoshop (over £600!!!). The price is a significant investment.

There needs to be more competition from other software houses.

Adobe’s pricing is now excessive. And whilst teh offer of a subscription model offers a lifebelt I think that Adobe doesn’t do this out of the kindness of their heart. Rather Adobe recognises that there is a shift towards the cloud. Adobe knows that it must migrate it’s users to a subscription model (the upgrades are too frequent and too expensive). Though it’s pricing and packaging options Adobe is starting to force our hands.

@Mark “You also forget to mention that if the Web Designer is new to the industry, they may be in education and as a result able to buy the whole Suite for less than £300.”

I believe Adobe’s terms insist that they stop using an educational copy once they went into business.